Anna Filippi, Alessandro Deserti, and Francesca Rizzo
Urban climate transitions require governance approaches capable of engaging with complexity, coordinating across multiple actors, and enabling long-term systemic change. Within the European Union’s Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission, the NetZeroCities (NZC) programme supports municipalities through a range of transition support services. Among these, the Seasonal Schools are intensive capability-building and peer-learning environments designed to strengthen cities’ capacities to develop, implement, monitor, and iterate their climate transition plans. While systemic design is increasingly associated with sustainability transitions, limited empirical research has examined how systemic design principles become operationalised within broader transition support programmes, particularly those not explicitly framed as systemic design interventions.
This paper analyses the NZC Seasonal Schools using Blomkamp’s (2022) systemic design principles as an analytical framework. Drawing on qualitative document analysis of NZC programme deliverables, complemented by reflexive insights from the authors as embedded researchers within NZC, the study examines how six principle—purpose-driven, recognising complexity, self-determination, equalising power, inclusive collaboration, and adaptive learning—are manifested through the design and delivery of the Seasonal Schools. The findings reveal two interconnected levels of operationalisation: principles are enacted through the design and delivery of the schools themselves, while the schools also seek to develop municipal practitioners’ capacities to enact systemic ways of working within their own city contexts. Recognising complexity, inclusive collaboration, and adaptive learning are strongly operationalised within the schools and also supported through capacities intended for application within cities. Purpose-driven is strongly oriented around the predefined Mission purpose of climate neutrality but more limited in supporting locally generated transition visions, while equalising power and self-determination depend more substantially on how capacities developed through the schools are subsequently enacted within local institutional and political contexts.
The study contributes empirically to understanding how systemic design principles operate within transition support services and methodologically by demonstrating their value as an analytical framework. Applying the principles analytically makes visible the underlying design logic through which systemic capacities are cultivated and broadens the empirical settings in which systemic design qualities can be recognised beyond explicitly labelled systemic design interventions.
Keywords: systemic design principles, sustainability transitions, climate neutrality, NetZeroCities, transition infrastructures